Mankind is degrading

[Benny1]

I mean in a mental sense.

I've been talking about this with reach a lot recently, and figured it would belong more here htan chit-chat.

What really bothers me is people who really just assume they already know it all. I can't really put it right, so I have to use an example, it's maybe a bit exxagerated, but it's the best I have. I told a friend about the space elevator (I posted an article about it earlier in chit-chat). He immediatly told me it was impossible. I asked him, why. He did not give me a single good reason for why it was impossible. All of his statements were ignorant, and not what I wanted to hear at all. And this kid I told it to is considered a fairly deep thinker by the standards of my school. What bothered me a lot about this is I gave him an article with how it could happen, and he immediatly said that was wrong and impossible. People are losing their ability to consider something that is vast, or unimaginable. I think, this is kind of like a Great Wall of China, something that seems rediculous at the time, but it ends up happening. The Great Wall didn't need any power tools to build, and they didn't have precut rocks. They did all of the labor, and it happened, and I am sure there are people who thought such a vast seeming project would be impossible. But you can see it now, it is still there, proof that the impossible is possible.

Secondly, this is more of a complain on he grading system of any school and IQ. IQ is very unreliable, and anyone who really takes an IQ test to see if they are very smart or not is probably getting wrong results. For a proper IQ test to be done well, it would need to be completely broad and cover everything in a subject, or incredibly precise, and cover everything in a subject the same way. Those kind of questions are basically unwritable. Also, with standardized testing, which seems to be the new rage, you run into many problems. I got some results from the big Illinois standardized test from 8th grade a few days ago. I got a perfect score on the math portion of the test. What bothers me though is it didn't test for anything but knowledge of how to do this and this. But there was no thinking involved. Standardized tests require no thinking. They are trying to train us to be robots that answer everything with no thought.
The funny thing is, a few days before this idea really sparked, in lit we read an article about how many ap classes are only covering the general, nonthinking knowledge, and then when they need to thinkin college, they have massive problems. This is proving my point perfectly true: standardized tests, or in this case, the AP tests, prove nothing but general knowledge. What does it really mean if you know all of these formulae, and ideas, but you don't know how to apply them, or you cam't understand WHY.
Also, I don't like many reading classes, because in my reading class, there are test questions galore with two answers. They say, Choose the best answer, but if you look at it more than one way, which they encourage a lot, you see both answers are better in a way. This is the problem with human written tests, they have massive flaws like this. Also, trying to have a human grade a paper will never work, as there will be bias.

I guess the title was a bit overboard, but still, people should be thinking more and more nowadays, but rather, with standardized tests, and IQ, people are losing all original thought, and becoming robots.

I am also aware IQ isn't new, I'm just using it right now, as my friends take it, and other people i know take it. I feel IQ is a good idea, it was done wrong though.

I'm sorry about any spelling mistakes, I'm kind of tired, I just don't want to sleep, and had this sitting on my mind ofr a while. I'm curious to see what you all think of this